The World as I Found It

by Bruce Duffy

  Well, she said drolly, you’ll have to be doubly quiet with your guests beside us.

  There’ll be no problem, Russell replied. I saw Moore nodding. They’ll be going up to bed soon.

  I’ll be waiting, Miss Marmer said, and then a duskiness crept into her voice. She was a moaner, she was, and she was slowly curling into herself like a cat drunk on catnip. Moving her shoulders slightly, she looked as if she would loop across the rug and start rolling on her back. Do you know how I’ll be waiting? she asked, and then she gave another slight squirm to get his juice up, to show him what he would be having upstairs later. A familiar dish: throat of pearls and lipstick, the clop of her black mules and the silk kimono that he liked to spread over her perfumed buttocks like a peacock’s fan as she bent over and slowly touched her toes, flowering for his breathless adoration like the sucking purplish anemone. Opera would be playing — Puccini, probably — and he knew he would find her usual lubricity as through her rather small teeth she panted, Don’t stop — don’t, dear — don’t. This was harrowing. In sex she was another person. In fact, he sometimes felt squelched and squeamish at this woman’s rasping meeoooww. After all, there was what the libertine doctor prescribed for civilization’s ills, and then there was the other truth, that there should be pleasure, certainly, even abandon, but only so much as was seemly. Why, a fellow of his years was liable to rupture himself, straddling the grunting goddess of the Golden Mean.

  After this interlude, Russell returned to the dinner table. To his surprise and relief, Max himself returned a few minutes later. The horse wasn’t out of the stable.

  Russell had been right in gauging the Moores: Moore was suppressing yawns, and Dorothy was getting restless. Even Wittgenstein was tired. They all were tired, but there was still a certain tension, a scratchiness in the conversation, which was being passed round the table like dry bread. Here, just before they all went up to bed, were the opening shots of Wittgenstein’s Viva the next day. It must have been the story about Wittgenstein resuscitating the train that started it. The talk turned to miracles — what they were and whether, in this age, there were any. Wittgenstein and Max were both disgusted when Russell again provocatively suggested that the incident with the train might be rightly termed a miracle.

  Call it intuition — mechanics, said Wittgenstein. It was no miracle.

  Then Max spoke up, saying, in effect, that miracles were an extinct phenomenon, the last having been performed by Christ and the Apostles. The rest — the saints and their acts, the holy relics — were all lies and blasphemy. Max continued:

  Christ started his life as Lord at Cana, to turn the water to the wine. And at the last dinner, he turns the wine to blood. Looking vehemently round the table, Max concluded, In this there is much to know. But no one, even Russell, wanted to ask just what.

  Taking a sip of sherry, Russell then turned mischievous. Invoking the shade of Voltaire, he said to Max, God, you would admit, set the world in order. God knows all things. How, then, do you explain, Max, why he who knew and made all things would violate his own order by letting his son work miracles in order to make ignorant men believe?

  This is mere enlightenment cleverness, interjected Wittgenstein, trying to preempt Max’s fury. Voltaire assumes God must always be reasonable. A venerable old clock maker. This accounts for nothing. You might as easily say that Christ performed a sort of miracle by having the fortitude not to perform one. Here I refer to when the devil tempted Christ in the desert, daring him to throw himself down from the mountain since it was written that angels would catch him.

  Russell’s face grew red. His sudden anger was quite unaccountable as he suddenly said, Yes, and Jesus might have performed another miracle that day! I mean when the devil showed him all the world’s kingdoms arrayed there below. Christ might have united the world forever in a single stroke. But what instead does he do? Nothing! A thousand wars since, and he wastes himself with circus tricks — raising corpses and making idiots speak!

  At this, Max lunged up, sneering. So smart you are, Russell! I know not much, it is true. But about God or war I will say you know not one thing! Not one! And I will say to you all good night.

  But this is only a discussion, protested Russell weakly as Max burst through the door.

  For all his frustrations with Max that day, Wittgenstein was instinctively protective. Rising to go after him, Wittgenstein shot back at Russell, Well, now maybe you see! Not everyone is reasonable, Russell, not even God. Voltaire never understood this, either.

  Dorothy and Moore said their good-nights shortly thereafter. As they crept back through the long hallway to their room, Dorothy scarcely knew where to start.

  Oh, come now, she whispered. You mean you didn’t feel the friction between him and Dora? And what about that Higgins? I mean, didn’t it seem a trifle odd to you, him leaving so soon after Dora?

  Not really.

  Oh, come on, Bill. You astound me.

  And you astound me.

  Why must you always act as if it’s so distasteful? hissed Dorothy, pulling him back by the arm. What passes between us is intimacy, not gossip. I wouldn’t dream of saying this to anybody else. Where is the shame in admitting to me, your wife, what you see? Can’t we have this much between us?

  Moore stood glaring at her. I just don’t feel that everything bears recounting or comment, that’s all. He started off again.

  But why? she asked, tugging his arm again. Where’s the virtue in that? And anyway, why should anybody care — or know — what we think? I hate it when we attend the same event and come away with utterly different impressions of people and what happened. I sometimes feel as if we’ve been in completely different rooms.

  Well, he said mulishly, so, in a sense, we have.

  Oh, quit! she hissed. Save that nonsense for your Viva. And please, don’t fall right asleep on me. And don’t groan. All day long, I’ve felt like a pair of bookends, with all these people wedged between us.

  There was light under the door of the next room, where they could hear, as through a wire, the tinny sound of some aria being played on a gramophone.

  What is that? asked Dorothy. Verdi? It’s a little late, I’d say. You’d think Bertie might have told us who’s sleeping in the room next to us.

  Pretend you’re in a hotel.

  I feel I’m in a hotel, thank you.

  As if to banish the chill ghosts of this otherness, Dorothy then started unpacking, hanging up clothes, filling drawers and arranging brushes and bottles along the dresser. Moore, meanwhile, took his towel and kit and went down the hall to wash. It was after ten, but the drafty house was still noisy, especially on the children’s end, where the children could still be heard chattering like crickets in their beds. But outside, too, there were voices and laughter, diffuse and indistinct in the distorting night air. Hearing a door open, Dorothy looked out the window and saw a man — was it Wittgenstein swinging his cane? — walking across the crackling gorse in the wind. A while later, as she was plumping up the pillows, she saw a woman disappear around the side of the house. The man was gone.

  There’s certainly an awful lot of activity going on outside at this hour, she said to Moore when he returned.

  At this they heard the toilet flush. Faint footsteps — a woman’s steps, it sounded like.

  Dorothy was standing by the bureau, looking tense. Moore scowled. Oh, stop it. Go on and get yourself ready.

  I just don’t like it, not knowing who it is. Leaning against the bureau, rubbing her arms, Dorothy said, At least she could turn off that opera.

  Moore was fast under the covers when she returned.

  I’m not asleep, he said before she asked.

  Not yet, you aren’t.

  She climbed into the bending bed, and drew up to him with a sigh. For some time she lay there, and then she said, You know, I couldn’t stand it, having to share my children with others, as they do. I can’t imagine it. Apportioning out love like that. Always having to be careful not to show
favorites, the complete lack of privacy. I couldn’t conduct my family on those terms, so publicly. I guess I’m too private and selfish. I suppose I am.

  Moore rested there with his mouth open, feeling her full warmth on his chest, the outside coming inside, that infusion of intimate peace as he expired further into the bed.

  I felt that myself earlier, he said finally. He’s such a public man, Bertie — public in ways I’ll never be. I can’t imagine it, having such an appetite for that arena, to be willing, as he is, to make such grist of one’s life. Perhaps it’s because he was an orphan. Maybe that’s why he’s made himself such a ward of the greater weal.

  They lay there a while longer, then Dorothy said, Do you know what this place reminds me of, vaguely? That hotel we stayed at in Harwich the summer before the war. What was it called? Something to do with Macbeth. You know the place I mean.

  He surprised her by remembering it straightaway. The Hurley-Burley, you mean.

  That’s it. Oh, my … Remember that old Scotsman who played the bagpipes? And you singing after supper while I played the piano?

  That was Foggy, Foggy Dew I sang.

  And that birthday party — no, no, an anniversary, it was. The one in which you played Poseidon, holding that pitchfork with your weed wig? God, they had some types there. Dorothy sniffed. They have some types here.

  The window was inclined into the summer air, the air that moved the curtains. Looking troubled in his recollection, his face glazed with moonlight, Moore said, You know … I distinctly remember hearing that they pressed the hotel into barracks during the war. And — that’s right — somebody told me the hotel burned down. God, I can’t remember where I heard that, but I’m fairly sure. Positive, in fact.

  Burned down? she asked disappointedly. You never told me that.

  Oh, this was years ago I heard it. Or did I read it?

  Air belled the curtains. Light sustained the air. Side by side, they were looking up to look out at their life, looking up at the time staring down.

  The sea was so glassy there, Dorothy said. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen you so relaxed as you were then, floating on your back. The other guests were all so much older than I — by now a good many of them must be under the ground. Do you remember that old lady, the one with that huge black birthmark on her neck who read tea leaves? She was always in a tizzy whenever you went for a float. I’d watch him if I were you, dear, she’d tell me. Over and over she’d say it. Scaring the daylights out of me. Saying you were liable to fall asleep and slip under the waves. You don’t know what I used to go through, waiting there — I hated you staying out there so long.

  Moore shifted around. Suddenly he was wide awake. I remember you complaining, but you never said it bothered you that much. Why did you never tell me?

  Dorothy lay a long time without answering, anxious, tugging at a strand of hair. Nudging her, he said, Well?

  She hesitated, then said, I didn’t feel I could. I didn’t want to be a worrywart. I knew how you loved the water. And you mustn’t forget — you were so much older than I. I might have seemed independent, but I was still a girl in ways, there were still things I couldn’t tell you. Dorothy turned to him. Her eyes were moist. Didn’t you ever think of me sitting on the beach, waiting for you?

  But of course I did, he said, pulling her closer. I was always aware of you up there, tugging at me. Didn’t you know that?

  He thought she was going to cry then as she said, I was so idealistic then, still the bride. My eyes were this big. I remember I used to think that if we were truly tied you would finally read my mind and know to come in. But you never came in when I wanted. So I sat and sat, fretting and watching for you like a dog tied outside a sweetshop, wondering why you had to do it.

  But why did you never tell me? he remonstrated. I don’t know why I swam out so far … Moore took a long breath. I never expected to marry, I felt such a duffer then. Being forty, I mean, with my fellow’s meals and fellow’s rooms — I thought I had long passed the point of being eligible. I simply couldn’t believe it, married after all those years. I had no perspective, I felt I needed to pull back to see our life — I had to swim off a distance. Not that I completely wanted to, you understand. Oh, even as I was wading out I would be thinking of coming back in. In a way, I felt as if it were a little daily ordeal so we could be reunited — to properly think of myself as this man, paired with this woman. The idea that even apart we were bound. Oh, I know, it was the simplest little thing, but somehow I couldn’t quite grasp it. For the life of me I couldn’t get the hang of it — having you there.

  They hit a rock then: able to think back no further, they lay for some minutes in each other’s arms, thinking of the miracle of this time and of that ultimate separation, when they would succumb finally to the undertow of fallow earth. It was that sad old matrimonial song. Two by two, or in twain, the partners went up like Noah’s beasts into an unknown ark, with theirs and all theirs after them following them into the ground. It was bitter in its way, the necessity of this life, and yet they hung on to it so doggedly, clinging to each other with that odd longing for something that is already there, but only provisionally, so long as they could sustain themselves on these hypnotically recurring tides, under the receding eaves of this light.

  Moore didn’t last long in this swimming. He was the first to go, while Dorothy, as usual, was still lying wide awake, with his slumbering weight athwart her flank. The house groaned, it carried sounds like a telephone, with a pinging undersea sound. Sometime later, half asleep, Dorothy heard a child crying, then later still, the sound of a man’s cautious footsteps, followed a few minutes later by the delicate but unmistakable creaking of springs. And then — this was unusual — Dorothy awoke, roused from a dream, with Moore inside her. Grappling and struggling against her, he was half asleep as the bed bobbed and rocked, the two of them blundering like sleepwalkers into completion.

  At five, had they been awake, they might have heard somebody creaking down the steps. But they heard nothing and did not remember their long dream together, until two hours later when their host crept back up the stairs to wake them for breakfast.

  A Synoptic View

  MAX was the first up that morning — first after the cook, Mrs. Bride, who arrived at five-thirty, after breakfast for her own family.

  Whatever else, Max had not lost his common touch. He soon charmed Mrs. Bride, who spread before him two normal-size portions of kippers and eggs, which he was sopping up with a slab of bread when Russell came down at six-thirty for his morning tea.

  Max liked to earn his keep, and the evening before, he had told Russell that he would do some odd jobs that Tillham would have taken forever to do and botched besides. But Mrs. Bride spoke for Max first.

  Might I have him early this morning, sir? she asked Russell. He promised to fix the back sink, and I have several things else. T’wd be a help.

  Why, of course, said Russell, who at that point was far more concerned with keeping Max busy than with anything he might accomplish.

  Russell was in a slightly better mood, but only slightly, having kept something of a vigil for Lily the night before after the Moores had gone to bed. As he had stood there watching from his tower study, the headmaster had done some very involuted reasoning to justify his spying. He saw the light go out in Lily’s room — a signal? Well, Max wasn’t with her, that much was clear. Following his blowup, Max and Wittgenstein must have gone walking, because Russell later saw them return across the downs, a broad shadow and a slight one.

  Staring down from his tower, Russell found himself beset by all sorts of crazy and not-so-crazy fears. The sensational premise of his article “Are Parents Bad for Children?” seemed almost diabolically prescient now. Late at night like this, especially when he was working, it was sometimes painfully clear what would happen with Dora and the children. He could see it all very mathematically, as if their predicament were a sprawling and unwieldy theorem based on an immutable logic that onl
y he was cold and abstruse enough to see. Still, the truth came to him slowly now. He was well past the age of being thunderstruck, or of even wanting calamitous moments of vision. Rather, Russell now saw the truth by degrees, the light trickling down like dust motes in the general disarray. The dust might be brushed away or tidied, but it was always accumulating. He knew, at bottom, that it would not work with Dora, and that it would not work because he did not want it to work. Despite his high-minded feints about leaving the matrimonial door open, he did not want Dora, not really. In a way, he was even grateful that Dora had given him the perfect excuse. He was not willing, at this point, to impose on himself a life of quiet misery by working out some modern, selfless, perhaps even progressive marital arrangement. He remembered how he had told his guests of their desire to create an uncoercive school so they might break the violent and oppressive “form” of society. But the form, he saw, was in his mind; the coercion was that of his own intractable drives and habits. This was his downfall. It was this, he saw, that had led him to fail in the face of his own splendid vision. And of course it was comparatively easy to change one’s mind — to emend or retract one’s ideas — but the course of one’s life still persisted with all the sickening inertia of a derailed train. Here the public mask was useless, and his children, the fruits of his choices, were still oblivious to the subtleties of his evolving program, lost to his neat distinctions and the history he was writing. None of this missed him. Nor did he miss the irony that, once again, he would find himself playing the part of pacifist in spite of his natural lust for combat, especially now when, at bottom, he felt hors de combat.

  No, he wouldn’t have his children treated like small and miserable colonies caught in the tidal pull of two large, belligerent nations. He wouldn’t object. He wouldn’t bloody Dora, or himself, in a fruitless court battle to wrest the children from her. He could see it all quite fatalistically. Dora would get the children and the school. And then old Higgins would step in and sweep up all the cards — everything.